Consensus and Flocking under Communication Failure

Abstract

For networked systems, Persistent Excitation and Integral Scrambling Condition are conditions ensuring that communication failures between agents can occur, but a minimal level of service is ensured. We consider cooperative multi-agent systems satisfying either of such conditions. For first-order systems, we prove that consensus is attained. For second-order systems, flocking is attained under a standard condition of nonintegrability of the interaction function. In both cases and under both conditions, the original goal is reached under no additional hypotheses on the system with respect to the case of no communication failures.